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"we're having scrambled eggs," fred said, when we were finished. he put away the glass bowl of glistening white ovoids with here and there the faintest green showing. "i always think scrambled eggs come out better if you cook them in a double boilerdo you mind if i put in a dash of worcestershire sauce? it adds something i've always enjoyedbut it may not be you.""sure," i said. "go ahead."
fred got out his white enameled double boiler and returned to the stove. "i'm just so sorry marilyn didn't come with you . . . ."
i've often pondered on the terms "gay culture," "gay society," "gay sensibility." the hard-headed marxist in me knows that we must be talking about behavior, mediated through psychology, that responds to a whole set of social and economic forces that it would have been as easy to locate under fred's life as under mine. but at the intuitive level (i.e., that level wholly culture bound), where we feel as if, somehow, there is such a thing as a culture apart from infrastructural realities, gay society has always seemed to me an accretion of dozens on dozens of such minutiae, a whole rhetoric of behaviorhow to twist the skin off a clove of garlic, how to open the doors to the unsold box seats at carnegie hall with a dime, the shifting, protein and liquid knowledge of where sex is to be found in the city, this season, or worcestershire sauce in your eggsthat together make up a life texture i was at once almost wholly appreciative of, and at the same time felt almost wholly estranged from: as if it were a myth that i could never quite reach.
but perhaps (though today i still like worcestershire sauce in my eggs) any "identity"semantic, generic, personal, or culturalis always such an accretive, associative, but finally disjunctive illusion.